Ash Fontana - The AI‑First Company: How to Compete and Win with Artificial Intelligence

The animal kingdom is full of creatures with better senses than us humans. We cant see like owls or smell like dogs or hear like whales, nor can we do arithmetic faster than a computera creature of our own creation. But we are great at gathering a lot of information across our senses and processing it in parallel to learn fast. Thislearning fastis the definition of intelligence.

Now artificial intelligence (AI) can help us learn faster by gathering valuable data, processing it into information, and spreading it across networks. Companies that build AI increase their own intelligence. Thats what this book is all about: building AI-First companies with extraordinary capabilities of gathering, processing, and communicating information to where its needed, when its neededto learn faster than the competition.

AI-First companies were the firstand are still the onlytrillion-dollar companies, and they will dominate more industries more definitively than ever before.

This is your guide to building an AI-First company.

We like to make new tools and, by doing so, power through our natural limits. Charles Babbage, who arguably invented the first mechanical computer, said, It is not a bad description of man to describe him as a tool-making animal. We use our intelligence to learn how things work and build tools to make them work betterturning the gradual evolution of man into the fast revolution of man plus machine.

The first wave of tools, during the Stone Age, at least 2.6 million years ago, brought physical leverage. Think rope traps and spears. These allowed us to go beyond our immediate, physical reach to gather more food than we could with our bare hands. The industrial era of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought us increasingly complicated sets of tools that worked in harmony to plow fields and mill steel. However, this physical leverage and scale were limited by our intellectual capacity.

The second wave brought intellectual leverage. The printing press distributed information, but then computers allowed us to gather more information and perform computations beyond our ordinary intellectual reach. We learned how to move information around, throw it into a calculator, quickly send it to different places, and generate multiple insights. However, this intellectual leverage was limited by how much information we could acquire about the future.

Artificial intelligence brings the third wave of tools that give us decision-making leverage. These tools are affording us an entirely new form of intelligence that gathers, processes, and communicates information to make better decisions. Were learning better and faster as we see these decisions play out.

Lets thread a needle: in the first wave, it was possible to stitch fabrics faster than we could weave by hand using looms full of little levers. Physical leverage. In the second wave, computers turned drawingsvisual informationinto patterns for the loom to automatically weave. Informational leverage. The third wave changes the game: computers scan photos posted on social media, figure out consumer trends, draw up new styles and turn drawings into patterns for the loom. New styles hit the stores right as they become fashionable. Temporal leverage.

Whereas earlier tools gave us physical and intellectual leverage, AI provides decision-making leverage that fulfills two important imperatives. The first applies to all of society: getting more out of our limited resources. The second applies to businesses: building a competitive advantage. Whereas land, labor, and capital were the resources leveraged to compete in the last millennium, information is now the resource to leverage. Whereas the leading companies of yesterday excelled at managing land, labor, and capital, tomorrows leaders will excel at managing information.

There are many books about using land, labor, and capital to win at business. This book is about using information to win.

The AI-First Century started in 1950 with the development of AI and will finish around 2050 with AI being fully deployed across all industries, so its not too late for you to get started on applying AI in your industry.

If the first fifty years, from 1950 to 2000, were about getting AI to work in the lab, then the next fifty are about getting AI to work for people, business, and society. Understanding how it took the better part of a century to get to this point makes recent innovations seem even more remarkable and highlights our readiness to integrate AI with business strategy. Weve thought AI was just around the corner for a long time, but it turns out that it was just getting started, and we are only now bringing working AIs into the real world.

Here is the story of the people who built AI, bit by bit, over the last half century. They are the ones who got us here, and you are the one who will take their work forward over the next half century with the help of this book.